A bargain
Posted 30 Jul, 2005 at 22:28 by matt in /Music | Permanent link
The other week when I was spending the day catching up with Kael, we wandered into a used CD store. After scouring the joint for the half-dozen CDs I was sort of kind of hoping to acquire, I flipped through the $2 rack and found a copy of Eternal Nightcap by the Whitlams. For $2, how wrong could I go?
The Whitlams are (were?) an Australian group; this particular album dates from 1997. I was vaguely aware of the band's existence from a late-night session of music downloading back in grad school, when my Australian friend Andrew recommended that I get a hold of their cover of Dylan's Tangled up in blue. I did, and it was good, and I almost never thought about them thereafter.
Eternal Nightcap as an album doesn't sound a whole lot like that one track, but that's OK too. The general tone of the disc is a sort of self-consciousness showiness, like the music that you might hear in a cabaret at the edge of town. The closest comparison that comes to mind is Ben Folds Five's Whatever and Ever Amen, which features the same sort of general approach. (They came out at around the same time, too.)
All of the songs are listenable, and the lyrics are generally speaking quite clever (e.g. "She's one in a million / so there's five more just in New South Wales"). For my money, the standout is Louis Burdet, named after the songwriter's old uni roommate. The band really goes to town on this one; it's the sort of slightly demented showtune that Tom Waits in one of his earlier incarnations might have been proud of.
I'm not sure this is the best $2 I've ever spent on music -- I can probably come up with two truly great songs I've gotten off the Apple Music Store -- but it was definitely a good value for the money.